How to Play  the Dhol!

Lesson 1 

So you wanna play the Dhol, huh?…well, this is your lucky day!  Today I will be explaining how you can start playing Dhol even if you have had no musical training whatsoever!  The trick to these things is to start simple and perfect what you already know before moving on.  Lets get started!

Imagine if you will, a way to write SOUND.  Heck, you don’t have to imagine, that’s what we do every single day when we “write” in a language.  We are representing sounds that we speak with words that we write.  Dhol is no different.  The sounds that the Dhol makes are few but we have different ways of representing those sounds.  Each sound we make with the Dhol has its own “word” that is associated with it.  We call this “word,” a Bol.  Bols are basically words that represent Dhol sounds.  But, before we can start playing bols, we need to first understand what we are making the sounds with.  We will be using a Dhol with 2 heads: a bass and a treble head.  The bass head is played using a Dugga (thicker, curved stick) and the treble head is played using a Tili (long, thin stick).

All bols are played openly unless written so otherwise.  “Open” means that the dhol player needs to let the head vibrate freely (Hit the head and immediately move the stick away from the head so that the head can vibrate).  When you “Close” a bol, you basically strike the head with the stick and hold the stick on the head’s skin for a very short time.

Here is a list of basic bols:

GE:   A Bass Hit (Pronounced “ghay”)

NA:   A Treble Hit (Pronounced “naa”)

That’s it!  All other bols will be some combinations or variations of these 2 above!

More Bols:

KE:   A Closed GE (Pronounced “kay”)

DHA:  GE + NA  (Pronounced “dhaa”)

TIN:  A Closed DHA

X:    A GE played ON the Wood (the dhol shell)

- :   A Dash to denote an absence of a bol, a silence

Here are some other common names used for these bols:

GE:   Ghey, Ga, & Ghe

NA:   Ti, Ta & Ra (Ra is used for something else too…)

KE:   Ka, Ki

DHA:  Da, Din, Dhin, Dhey (sometimes Dhey is used for GE as well)

TIN:  Tak, Kin (sometimes kin is used for another bol…yup…later)

X:    K & Click

There are some other bols, which we will cover at some later time (another future date).

OK, now you have an idea of what the ‘alphabets’ of dhol are.  If you noticed, we first explained what a single HIT is called, then we built upon that and created 2-hit combinations like Dha which use these single hits and create something a bit more complex.  From here, we can finally start forming meaningful combination of these words into “sentences,” a.k.a. “Grooves” …….. oh yea B-)

Groovy

Without making this article too complimakated, lets just say, a groove is a pattern of music.  We are now going to focus on Grooves of 8 beats.  For now, lets just say, we are going to learn to play 8 bols.  We will call this set of 8 bols a Cycle.  So, playing a cycle of a groove means that you play all 8 bols.  With the bols, a dhol player also has to think about dynamics of a groove, dynamics refers to the ups and downs of volume.

Here is your first groove:

Groove: Chaal

In Chaal, odd numbered bols are played louder than even numbered ones.  Bol #1 is always played loudly.  These bols are not played robotically, there is a certain SWING related to them.  To listen to this groove, listen to any Punjabi song, 98% of the time, Chaal will be playing.  Some people also say this phonetically like this “Dhi-na Na-Kuh Na-Kuh Dhi-na” (repeat this for a couple of times, you will get an idea of what this groove is suppose to sound like…and you will recognize it in the music you listen to)

 
When playing this groove, start at One bol per second.  Every second you would hit a bol.  Doing it this way, will teach you to be ON TIME with your playing.  Once you get that, increase the speed by playing a cycle in 4 seconds…and so on.  Timing is the most important part of playing anything.  If you do ANYTHING within proper timing, it won’t sound strange to others…but as soon as you go OFF-beat, people will catch that immediately. 

There's a whole lot more to learn!

Wanna learn more? Give me a call or email me and setup some lessons!

510-589-2245  or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Happy Drumming!